A DEMOCRATIC MEMBER OF CONGRESS attempted over the weekend to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia at his new detention site in El Salvador only to be turned away by local authorities.

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) who counts Abrego Garcia as a constituent, went to the prison in Santa Ana, El Salvador on Monday. But Ivey told The Bulwark he was rebuffed. He was ultimately not able to meet with the Maryland father with a wife and kids who are both U.S. citizens.

“They tried to give us the runaround and stonewall us, saying that we had to go to San Salvador to get a permit to see him,” said Ivey. “But people who have someone there in prison said no one gets a permit.”

The congressman made the trip with one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, Chris Newman, and Jaime Contreras from the labor union SEIU. (Abrego Garcia is a member of a union, SMART, that is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which now also counts the SEIU as an affiliate.) Ivey said he spoke with El Salvador’s ambassador to the United States and with the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. “They knew we were coming,” he said. “They knew why we were coming, and they knew when. To refuse to give us the chance to have a meeting with my constituent, even in a minimum-security prison, makes absolutely no sense.”

Ivey’s failed effort to talk to Abrego Garcia adds another chapter to a saga that has come to symbolize the excesses and aggressiveness of the Trump deportation regime. It’s a case that has pitted branches of government against each other, put profound strain on the U.S. legal system, set off panicked scrambling within the administration, and galvanized both critics of the president and his most vehement anti-immigrant defenders.

And as the congressman explained, when recounting why he chose to take the trip at all, it’s become a case study on whether Democrats can truly fight Trump on his signature issue.

Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador on March 15 despite a court order prohibiting him from being deported to that specific country. Like many of the men accused of being gang members and sent to El Salvador, he was held in the CECOT mega-prison, known for human rights abuses. But when Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) succeeded in visiting with Abrego Garcia on April 17, Abrego Garcia said that eight days earlier he had been moved to a lower-security prison.

In a phone call with Ivey in El Salvador, I asked the congressman why he took the Memorial Day weekend holiday to travel more than 2,000 miles to try to see an immigrant the Trump administration has argued is a “leader” of the violent street gang MS-13 (though no evidence of such an affiliation exists).

“We were able to do it this weekend, I’ve been wanting to go earlier but my wife had medical issues and there were logistical things,” Ivey said. “He shouldn’t be down here, he shouldn’t be held in this prison, he should be brought back to the U.S. to get due process, even though the administration is trying to leave him down there defying a Supreme Court order to bring him back.”

Share

Ivey’s trip comes at a sensitive moment for the Democratic party with respect to Trump’s often unlawful overreach on immigration. As the Trump administration took extraordinary and unprecedented steps to deport even some U.S. citizens, including children with cancer, The Bulwark reported late last month that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was discouraging further trips to El Salvador in hopes of fighting back on more advantageous fronts. Jeffries’s office pushed back on the report after it sparked a negative reaction. But in the weeks since, other Democrats who had floated trips to El Salvador did not end up going.

Ivey himself acknowledged that there are disagreements within the party over how much an issue like El Salvador imprisonments should be prioritized.

“I appreciate their concern and their views but at the end of the day this is a constitutional issue,” he said, noting that Trump has defied district court, appellate court, and now U.S. Supreme Court rulings. “We can’t just let that go if the Trump administration believes they’re above the law, we have to make sure we correct that. Like the judges they’re attacking because they disagree with their rulings, we have to make sure they’re getting our support.”

Other than Van Hollen, no member of Congress has been able to see Abrego Garcia. Aware of how little contact he has had with the outside world, Ivey said he brought messages for Abrego Garcia from his wife, Jennifer. He didn’t share the specifics, save to say they were messages of hope and love, imploring Abrego Garcia to “keep your faith and to tell him she and the children are doing well.”

Newman said he carried a message, too, seeking to convey to Abrego Garcia that the charges being leveled at him by the White House were smearing him, based on flimsy evidence like the fact that he wore a Chicago Bulls hat and the president’s insistence that a clearly doctored photo of Abrego Garcia with the characters “MS13” tattooed on his fingers was real.

While in El Salvador, Ivey also held other meetings, including with nonprofits, university experts, and families of men who say they have been wrongly imprisoned in the country.

The congressman’s visit precedes plans by Democrats to make a renewed push to visit ICE detention centers after the Trump administration charged New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver with assaulting and impeding ICE agents as she tried to conduct legal legislative oversight.

Like members of the party who see increased detention center visits as wise, Ivey sees his El Salvador trip as a way of showing Americans that Democrats are both against Trump’s policies and willing to stand up and fight for constitutional rights.

“It’s about developing an affirmative message,” Ivey said.

Share

From CBS News: The Trump administration is planning to dispatch hundreds of border agents to U.S. cities to help with interior enforcement, even though historically “CBP’s work has been mainly limited to the Mexican and Canadian borders, maritime sectors and international airports.”

Leave a comment

Share The Bulwark